When I was offered the book "Forever Lily: A Unexpected Mother's Journey to Adoption in China" to review, I was thrilled. Having adopted two boys from China, I love a good Chinese adoption story. Two of my favorites are "The Waiting Child: How the Love of One Orphan Saved the Life of Another," and "The Lost Daughters of China." Since "Forever Lily" was also a personal memoir, I hoped it would rate right up there with the first two, which not only drew me immediately into their plots, they kept me there. Sadly, in this book, the latter did not happen.

Author Beth Nonte Russell has the makings for a good book. She writes well, and her descriptive style draws the reader in from the first page, but then she adds dream scenes which she believes are essential to her story, but which start to feel like a distraction to the reader.

Rusell accompanies a friend, Alex, to China to assist with her adoption, only to have Alex change her mind once she is given the baby. When Alex doesn't bond with the baby and decides she is going to give her back to the orphanage, Russell, who has been doing most of the care for the baby, steps forward and offers to take the child herself.

As I read, I found myself checking the back cover of the book to make sure this was based on Russell's true experience and not fictitious. Wouldn't it be every adoptive mother's fantasy to be handed a baby without having to endure the grueling paperwork, homestudy, and neverending wait for a referral, not to mention agency fees?

I also found myself wondering how Alex ever passed a homestudy and why as a grown woman with a husband and son, she was wanting to adopt a baby so she could feel loved and needed. She comes across as a very shallow, self-serving woman who says the baby is too frail, too small, too developmentally delayed to be the 13 month old child she was expecting, hence her decision to give her back, as Russell says, "as if she were returning a blouse."

Russell's story leads the reader down a path that her journey to China and Alex's rejection of the baby were destiny. After all, Alex didn't even bring a camera with her on the trip because it would have just been one more thing to carry. Doesn't sound like a typical adoptive mother, but Alex doesn't sound real maternal through any aspect of the book.

Russell intersperses dreams throughout the book where she was a poor peasant Chinese girl who is chosen by the Emperor to become an Empress. As an Empress, her marriage is never consummated, but she becomes pregnant with another man's child and is forced to relinquish her daughter. In an interview at the end of the book, Russell states that these dreams and meditations were actually past life experiences, and her daughter whom she ends up with is the daughter she was forced to give up in her previous life.

Obviously, since Russell believes that it was destiny that she and this baby meet up again, she feels the dream scenes are essential so the reader can understand her point of view. I found them rather unbelievable, however, as they were written in far more detail than any dream I have ever had. At the end of the book, Russell mentions that she wrote the dream sequences after much meditation, so she clearly added more to them than what she initially experienced.

Although I do believe somewhat in fate and destiny, the reincarnation theme from a previous life became a bit hard for me to swallow. I also felt like any time I was drawn into her story, she would lapse into another dream. It reminded me of one of the first musicals my oldest daughter saw when she was young. She said, "I liked the play, but every time it got good, they would stop and sing a song!" Like my daughter's first musical experience, I found myself almost annoyed or irritated each time a dream sequence would interrupt the plot and began to skim them in order to get back to the meat of her present-day story.

As a strength, Russell does write well with vivid descriptions as she describes China. As she walks through a market in Guangzhou, she states,

Several stands display large shallow bowls or baskets filled with live scorpions, which crawl frenetically up the sides of the bowl only to slip back down again. Stacked coils of dried snakes are piled high on tables; exotic root vegetables and herbs that look like gnarled human limbs are arranged in baskets and crates.

She has the ability to draw you into her travel experience, and reading it brought back my own memories from two trips to China.

Where I feel she fails, however, is in her descriptions of people and relationships. Russell has a master's degree in psychology, and she often lapses into sounding quite clinical as if she is dictating patient notes at the end of a mental health visit.

...Alex doesn't feel the way she expected to feel, but those feelings were choked off by her own inflexibility. Things must be as she has decided to expect, or she rejects them, they are not real. Instead of deciding to work with and overcome her anxiety, she decides to reject the reality that has caused the anxiety.

In the end, she ends up with the baby and even treats the reader to an epilogue as she travels to China for baby number 2. Her love for Lily is evident, but as I read her dreams and how she believed she came to be reunited with her daughter, I found myself wondering what kind of story she will put in Lily's lifebook. Will Lily go to first grade and share at Show and Tell that she is really the illegitimate child of a Chinese empress?

If you're dying to read yet one more memoir of a Chinese adoption, I think I'd keep looking. This one just didn't do it for me.

Other memoirs that might be of interest to Chinese adoptive parents:

"A Passage to the Heart"--a collection of short writings from parents of adopted Chinese children

" Meeting Sophie"